hello all, I am looking to breed my female retic for the first time and was wondering what else I should do to get her ready besides feeding her more, like temp changes, day/night cycles, how to tell if she ovulated or just has a big poop. Any advice would be much appreciated as I want this to go smooth and as stress free for both me and my girl. Thanks in advance!
p.s. if I were to get another male retic within the next month would he have enough time to acclimatize and be ready to breed by the start of the season?
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I don’t have any experience with retics, so I can’t help with that, however…
Absolutely not. Ideally any new animal you purchase needs to be quarantined for a few months at minimum to be sure it’s not carrying any diseases or parasites that could affect the rest of your collection.
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yea that’s what I figured too I’ve heard people that only quarantine for a month and try and breed so I just wanted to double check as that seemed pretty risky to me. I do have another male that is ready to breed tho so I will just stick with him. Thanks for your help tho!!
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Before you go too far down this road, are you prepared to keep 40-70 baby retics? The weekly food bill on an average retic clutch is $150-300. They usually take 6-12 months to sell. By the time you get them all sold you’ll be somewhere between $3,000 and $12,000 into the food bill.
You’ll also need to have a couple FB40 or preferably FB70 racks ready ($6000 give or take, or if you build them yourself $2-3k) if they don’t sell fast enough you may need bigger tubs after about 8 months.
As far as the nuts and bolts of breeding them, you’ll need a male that’s upwards of 5’ but preferably 7-8’ if you have a large female. Pairs are not always compatible and sometimes the females will reject a male so you can’t necessarily count on getting breeding behavior with just one male. Otherwise it’s pretty much stock standard python breeding.
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yea I understand the responsibility and have been getting ready all year to house all the baby’s and already have a well established rat and mice colony so the hatchlings will have food available at any size and I am ready and willing to house them for extended periods of time.
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